Hofstede Fund for Culture Research

The Hofstede Fund for Culture Research supports and complements the research and advanced culture-related education programs of the Hofstede Chair in Cultural Diversity, as a research position that supports the international mission of Maastricht University. The chair is administered by UM Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

The Chair as well as the Fund engages in projects within the comparative societal culture research tradition that has emerged from the work of Geert Hofstede. This tradition is centered on the quantitative analysis of the origins and implications of values associated with the cultural characteristics of nations and large social groups. The Chair and Fund also support the use of other scholarly perspectives on culture-related phenomena to complement the Hofstede research tradition. The Chair and Fund have a University-wide mission.

Spending committee

An advisory committee is connected to the Hofstede Fund for Culture Research. This committee is responsible for allocating and prioritizing the fund’s support to research projects. The members of the committee also act as ambassadors for the mission that the fund shares with the Hofstede Chair in Cultural Diversity. The members of this committee are:

• Ms. Dr. C. Arnold;
• Mr. Prof. Dr. G. Hofstede;
• Mr. Dr.  G.J. Hofstede;
• Mr. Prof. Dr. M. Peterson.

Inaugural programmes and projects

Geographic Boundaries of Societal Culture
The Geographic Boundaries program analyzes the cultural significance of geographic boundaries to explain the origins and cultural implications of within-country regions, country boundaries, and multiple-country groups for organizations and societies.

Societal Structures and Organization Structures
The Structures program studies organizations as doing their work within societal cultural systems, and as relying on a configuration of roles, rules and norms to make sense of and react to the events that they and their members encounter in the course of doing business.

World Values Survey (WVS) Measures and Correlates: Linking Political Science to Organization Studies
The WVS program promotes interdisciplinary learning between political science and organization studies by assessing relationships between measures developed in the two fields, by evaluating existing constructs and measures, and by designing new constructs and measures.